"One of the biggest fallacies of Silicon Valley is that it's a
meritocracy," he says. "But, really, only the most deluded
and douchiest people I met in Silicon Valleyactuallythink it is."

Those people are the ones who justify their
hundred-million-dollar payouts by believing that they worked a
hundred-million times harder than the people working on the
startup next door, he says, instead of admitting that in a lot of
ways making it big in Silicon Valley is a mix
of "happenstance, membership in a privileged cohort,
or some concealed act of absolute skulduggery."

Martínez didn't specifically call out how race,
gender, and orientation can be some of the biggest blocks to
that meritocracy. Silicon Valley is still very much a
place where straight white men are succeeding.

He also explores the corporate form of this lie, where
companies try a zillion things, and then act like the one that
worked was its plan all along.

"What was an improbable bonanza at the hands of the flailing
half-blind becomes the inevitable coup of the assured visionary,"
he writes in the book. "The world crowns you a genius, and
you start acting like one."